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Animal Crossing’s fake language sounds different in Japanese
- juancn 6y agoAnimalese is a simple phonetic translation of the text. It’s super noticeable in Spanish which is fairly straightforward. In English it’s a simplistic translation to phonemes as far as I can tell.
- ziml77 6y agoI first realized what they were doing when talking to Blathers. The hoots in his speech were easy to pick out in the audio which then led to hearing that the rest of the text was being spoken. After noticing it, it's been much easier to hear it happening for all characters.
- BoorishBears 6y agoYou can notice it at the screen where you enter your name at the start of the game As you move the cursor over each letter, the character speaks out a phonetic sound similar to the letter you're on
- coding123 6y agoI'm curious if that's the same for other games that do similar "gibberish" sounds like Mario Odyssey and Zelda games - I do think the gibberish "sounds" englishy. I can see them making it sound more like Japanese gibberish in Japan.
- Shared404 6y agoThe clothes shop attendant out front in Kakariko Village actually yells something in Japanese iirc. Edit: In the english version of Breath of the Wild.
- treeman79 6y agoHow English sounds to foreigners. https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY https://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY
- lovemenot 6y agoYeah, that's good. As a native English speaker (UK), I'll be pedantic. That's also how Americans sound to me.
- wincy 6y agoMy wife is from New York and has a very difficult time understanding non-US accents. She has to watch British period dramas with subtitles.
- garmaine 6y agoI thought that link was going to be Prisencolinensinainciusol: https://youtu.be/_g6YxkSqL20 https://youtu.be/_g6YxkSqL20
- Galanwe 6y agoInterestingly, we have a word in French to call these gibberish languages that sound like real ones but have no meaning. It's called speaking "yogurt". It was originally used because young French people wanted to sing the English songs that they heard, but didn't know the language, so they would make up sounds that looked like English.
- proper_black 6y agoThis exact thing is called "washawasheo" or "washawashear" in (Mexican) Spanish. It would be cool to know what languages have this, as I'm pretty sure not all of them do (Russian doesn't, for example).
- ryanschneider 6y agoReminds me of the (supposed?) etymology of “barbarian”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian > The Greeks used the term barbarian for all non-Greek-speaking peoples, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes and Phoenicians, emphasizing their otherness. According to Greek writers, this was because the language they spoke sounded to Greeks like gibberish represented by the sounds "bar..bar..;"
- ta1234567890 6y agoAnd a band made a hit song in Spanish about it in the early 2000s, Asereje: https://youtu.be/V0PisGe66mY https://youtu.be/V0PisGe66mY
- grey_earthling 6y agoThis song is loosely a cover of Rapper's Delight.
- johncoltrane 6y agoInteresting, I have never heard the expression "chanter en yaourt" used for anything other than fake English.
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- jonathankoren 6y agoReminds of glossolalia. The speaker believes they’re speaking a foreign language, but when you examine the “language” it’s just random phonemes from the speaker’s native language.
- vimy 6y agoReminds me of a song from 1972 by an Italian comedian. The song is called "Prisencolinensinainciusol" which means...well, nothing. It's gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8&feature=emb_titl...
- Waterluvian 6y agoIt's also a pretty catchy song. But yeah it messes with my brain that is working hard to parse English. It's interesting. If a language is clearly not English I don't have the same issue.
- wincy 6y agoIs English your native language? Because for me at least as a native English speaker I immediately recognize it as gibberish and have no such problem. I’m curious if it’s a native/non-native issue with parsing or not.
- Waterluvian 6y agoYes it is. I'm a very strong English speaker/listener. I get this in a lot of things. Human brains love finding patterns and everyone does this to an extent. I think mine does it so much more. For example if I ever see numbers anywhere I'm compulsively adding them to see if any nicer looking numbers result. I wouldn't be surprised if this inclination to hear jibberish and try to parse it into language is a me thing.
- oooooooooooow 6y agoAdriano Celentano is a singer songwriter, actor, director, screenwriter, composer, film editor and TV author[1]. He definitely has humor and used irony throughout his career, but wouldn't call him a comedian by any stretch. [1] Taken from wikipedia
- SftwreEngnr 6y ago
- Razengan 6y agoInstead of the constant focus on graphics graphics graphics, why don’t companies improve other tech like speech synthesis for a while? That would bring about a new boom (pun) of creativity by allowing indie devs to write complex stories with spoken dialogue without having to worry about hiring actors and immutable recording sessions.
- cbhl 6y agoThere aren't super technical burdens to speech synthesis in games; for example, Jackbox Party Pack 7 runs just fine on the Switch and contains a speech synthesis engine for "Blather Round". I imagine it's mostly a licensing/cost thing (since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor and doing a recording session).
- Razengan 6y ago> since a "voice" for a speech synthesis engine still requires hiring an actor That's what I'm talking about. Surely we can do away with that if we try, just as we don't need real people to build 3D models -from- if we don't want them.
- klodolph 6y agoI’m not sure what you mean when you say we don’t need real people to build 3D models. If we want 3D models, someone has to make them. That person might be a traditional modeler working in Blender, or a sculptor in ZBrush, or might be someone with a 3D scanner doing photogrammetry. The tools are changing, but it is still people using the tools. Just like how we invented an “automatic programming” system where the computer will do programming for you, and it turns out that once we’ve made automated programming we have more programmers and not fewer. The tools for making 3D models are getting better and easier to use, and as photogrammetry is being used more and more, we see larger teams of modelers, not smaller.
- zerocrates 6y agoThey're comparing making a bespoke 3D model of a character as opposed to scanning an actual person, saying similarly you could just create a voice from scratch rather than record a real one.
- bschwindHN 6y agoI play it in Japanese, I thought it was always just a high-pitched, sped up version of the sounds the language is composed of.
- komali2 6y agoWhen I was a kid the only way I could play video games was in 1 week bursts in the form of hollywood video rentals. When we picked up animal crossing for GameCube and I heard animalese, I thought my disc was messed up and went back to swap it out. I was too young to really know how to google something like that.
- drosan 6y ago> why does Nintendo bother to dub it? Yellow press at its best - discussing topics they didn't even bother to research properly. "The gibberish" is being made by voice synthesiser, very simplistic one; it was the same way back on Animal Crossing New Leaf on 3DS and even previous ones (DS, Wii, GC).
- nubb 6y agoA thread on jibberish video game languages isn’t complete without a mention of Simlish. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2020/2/7/21126705/the-sims-simlish-language-history-20th-anniversary-game https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
- marcan_42 6y agoIt was never supposed to be nonsense. To anyone playing in Japanese or presumably other phonetically consistent languages, it's obviously a sped up, slurred/somewhat mangled version of what the text is saying. I guarantee not a single Japanese player didn't notice this, or otherwise thinks it's pure gibberish. Japanese is not my native language and I noticed immediately; any native would have too. The problem is that English is a phonetically inconsistent language, with a massive number of rules required to even begin to approximate the mapping from text to phonemes (and zillions of exceptions). So this kind of really dumb TTS not intended to be actually intelligible doesn't work at all in English. And so it sounds like actual nonsense.
- resu_nimda 6y agoIt did work in English though. Maybe not as well, but I do remember noticing in the original Animal Crossing that there was some correlation between the sounds and the text. Even if it was just the timing and intonation, it could definitely be understood that the lines were actually being spoken in some form. I don't think it was TTS because it was too accurate in a really subtle way. Or maybe it was and they tweaked it well enough to work. It's been a while, my memory could be off. I don't know if it would have been prohibitive on the GameCube to have audio of every line (there were a lot), but I wouldn't put it past them to have done so.
- marcan_42 6y agoIt's TTS. They absolutely don't go dubbing around every line for this, that'd be insane. That's the whole point of this system, to provide some fun sounding audio for the lines without having to actually dub them. You can tell because they speak your island name and your own name exactly the same way as the rest of the text, accurately. And because it's pretty monotone and consistent. Besides, can you imagine voice actors dubbing this stuff in this kind of voice line by line? They'd go insane.
- resu_nimda 6y agoYeah that makes sense. I guess I figured they could have processed the spoken audio, not that the actors would have actually talked like that. I was just fooled by the fact that their TTS sounds more passably human than any other I've heard (in an abstract way).
- lhr0909 6y agoI believe they run the dialogs into a program and generate the sounds from it. I play AC in Chinese and the words do sound like Chinese. It is just crazy to wrap my head around the amount of effort they put into this game.
- etiam 6y agoOn not all gibberish being created equal: it's been long enough since "What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners" that some people here may have missed have missed this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw
- bryanh 6y agoSomeone on Reddit recreated the audio effect in Python, pretty fun and well done! Github: https://github.com/equalo-official/animalese-generator https://github.com/equalo-official/animalese-generator Video Explainer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYnI_ZLj5ys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYnI_ZLj5ys
- lloda 6y agoI haven't heard AC's speech, but the description sounds a bit like the way Donald the Duck talks.